Mining-funded video game?

[carbonpenguin]

I just had this idea, and was wondering as to others' opinions. What if someone created a video game that was distributed for free with no monthly fees. Instead, the TOS specify that whenever the game is being played, a certain fixed % (say, 20%) of your computer's processing power will be devoted to mining for a pool owned by the developer of the game. The revenue generated from that pool could then fund bounties for new game developments, etc.

The game I was thinking of specifically is Battle for Wesnoth (as it's the most developed open source game out there), but it seems like the model could work for many different things. Thoughts?

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[ploum]

Do you have an idea on what represent 20% of a normal CPU mining bitcoins for a whole day?

I guess it's something like 0,0001 BTC (today, not including future difficulty). Now, you don't run the whole day but only a few hours. Let say that you play 2,5hours/day and you play 3 days/week for 50weeks (nearly the whole year). That's 0,0015BTC/year.

If you have 10.000 players playing at this rate (and that's fairly optimistic), it would be something like 15BTC/year.

At this rate, do you think it worths the trouble?

Maybe, it's a lot more useful for games developers to put a bitcoin donation address on their website. Battle of Wesnoth is already on Flattr (I subscribed to them) and I believe they are making more money that way:
https://flattr.com/thing/56371/The-Battle-for-Wesnoth

(But it would be a good idea to convince Battle of Wesnoth developers to accept donations)

[carbonpenguin]

Hmmm, I guess part of the question is what the RoR will be for mining once the economy transitions from new money to transaction fees as the reward to miners. If something like WoW built this in as part of their business model, it could form a not-insignificant revenue stream. However, point well taken concerning the issue of processing power per-user...

On a side note, has there been any talk of flattr offering a bitcoin denominated service - cuz I would totally subscribe to that, but am not sold on putting FRNs into it...

[fornit]

its very simple i think. create a pool or workers on an existing pool and award gametime (or something of worth for the game) for generated shares or btc.
not much different than normal mining and then paying for the game, just that its more convienent for the player. best works with some kind of automated setup for a gpu miner.

[ploum]

On a side note, has there been any talk of flattr offering a bitcoin denominated service - cuz I would totally subscribe to that, but am not sold on putting FRNs into it...

Indeed, great idea. Look for "bitcoin" on the flattr forum. In fact, Flattr told us that their would be interested to provides bitcoin as long as someone else offer them a service that automatically buy their bitcoin.

I'm looking to develop one myself in order to allow that. If anybody programmer want to join me (preferably django or php programmer), please contact me.